FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is there no SkyTeam option?

There now is! KL has been added as an option

How does the app work?

Magic!

Seriously though, it’s pretty simple. What it does is loads the relevant carrier page and performs a search just like you manually do. If you enable debug mode on the settings page, you can actually see it in action.

Will you add carrier X?

Maybe.

Searching JL/NH keeps giving me errors

JL sometimes require you to enter the city code and not the airport code. I’ve handled

JFK/EWR/LGA -> NYC

ORD/MDW -> CHI

LHR/LGW -> LON

CDG/ORY -> PAR

NH sometimes requires you to enter the airport code and not the city code. I’ve handled

NYC->JFK/EWR

You may need to use either the airport code/city code for others that I did not handle. Let me know if you know of any and I’ll add them.

Searching BA is slow

The BA site can sometime be slow. BA also doesn’t list aircraft information on their search result page so it takes a little more time to get that detail.

What results are returned

Only the lowest level of award(least miles) are shown. The other levels are generally bad redemption value.

Do I really need another award flight search tool?

Sure, why not? I created this for my personal use a few months ago when I was searching for award flights. Hopefully you’ll find it useful.

How are my credentials stored? Is this app safe to use?

Your account info is stored locally in Chrome's localStorage container. It is never transmitted to any service. The app also doesn't call out to any other server other than the Chrome Web Store or a carrier's webpage. Your carrier username/password is also not synced across your different machines like your saved search details are unless you choose to by clicking the "Sync user accounts" button.

34 thoughts on “FAQ”

Looks pretty interesting. Is there any way to search for more than two passengers? It would be great if you could support searching for the same number of passengers as that allowed by the underlying search site. (For example, both BA and JL allow searching up to 9 passengers). That would be much more useful to me than being restricted to only searching for two.

I’m actually looking into including this in the next release. The only reason I capped it at two was that I didn’t really look into how many passengers each underlying site would allow and two seemed like a safe number.

This may be a dumb question but does the number in parenthesis next to the check mark on the results screen service represent how many award seats are available? Sometimes there is a 1 and other times no number in parenthesis. Can you explain?

1. What’s the difference between “Sync accounts” and “Save”? And what does Retrieve synced accounts info mean?
2. There should be some sort of confirmation when you click save (or whatever I’m supposed to click) that the info was saved…currently u click save and nothing happens so as a user you’re confused whether or not it worked
3. What is the point of having users select cabins during the initial search set up if they then have to use filters to re-do the seelctions they just entered (i.e. I want to see only First & Business but all my search results included economy so I then had to open the filters tool and remove economy a second time)

2. I hate confirmations. If there is no error notification, I assume my action succeeded.

3. Some carriers require a cabin to be selected. SQ/JL/EY requires a cabin when searching. BA/QF/NH/AC doesn’t. It’s essentially a catch all to avoid having to have separate validation rules for each carrier which I think I originally had.

First of all I hope I’m not coming off like a complainer – I think this tool is AMAZING, I’m literally giddy cuz I used to make massive spreadsheets that contained all this info by manually running hundreds of KVS searches. I’m just trying to offer constructive feedback:

So I think a very common scenario is probably what I’m trying to do right now which is this: I want to go to HKG at any point in May but due to work / trying to maximize vacation days I only want to leave on a Friday or Saturday. Currently I only have two options: Select May 1 and then enter +30 days OR run 4 different searches (first search would be May 6 +1 day, 2nd search would be May 13 +1 day, third search would be May 20 +1 day, etc).

I think the smarter way to do it would be to have some sort of calendar function where u can just highlight the specific days u want to search (similar to how when u are doing something in excel if u hold down the Ctrl key it allows u to select multiple items). So that way a user could pop open a calendar and select every friday and saturday in May which would only be ~8 days and therefore the search should be much more efficient since it isn’t wasting time checking all the other ~22 days that I don’t want to travel on.

I’m not sure yet because how I generally search for awards uses the +days methodology instead of having a specific set of days but it does sound like a good idea.

How long? Initially I think I only had NH, BA, EY & JL. It took 2-3 weeks to do that and a lot of that was figuring out Chrome apps and how to get the embedded web page(s) to talk to the app. It probably helped that I had written an app similar to KVS that did award searches before so the searching/parsing was the easy part.

Running some searches tonight using BA – strange thing is that both SFO-HKG and SFO-NRT is just endlessly loading without ever actually finishing…All the other city pairs, i.e. JFK-HKG, ORD-NRT, etc. are working fine so the only thing in common between the frozen searches is that origin point is SFO

not sure where my previous comment went, so here it is again
Is it possible to make filter options GLOBAL instead of per-search?
e.g. I want to find ECONOMY flights only, and with RESTRICTIVE option for all searches
I don’t want to un-check many checkboxes for every saved search
Thanks